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According to Adobe, the Flash Player is estimated to be “installed on over 800 million Internet-connected desktops and mobile devices”. Additionally, the Flash Player and Flash videos are platform-independent meaning that no matter what operating system you are running, you will be able to view our video training.
Several challenges immediately became apparent:
a. Where do we host the videos? Our host must support streaming videos.
b. How do we deliver them?
c. How do we maintain them?
There's nothing like a couple of good challenges to get the creativity going! Obviously we needed a corporate decision on challenge a. Hosting any kind of website has a monetary impact and since we needed approval for this, we handed the where off to our director, Lance Dacy and our Senior Vice President, Curtis Simmons. They found us a solution in the Experience site.
Challenge b was also a focus of our discussions. How do we deliver these videos? Do we provide our users with one big honking HTML file that lists all videos, descriptions, length, intended audience, etc? That was an OK solution, but not ideal. You would have to scroll around quite a bit to find what you were looking for. Our next thought was to provide different pages based on main topics with smaller lists of videos. This was also not a bad solution, but still not a winner. Both of these ideas required someone who knew HTML to be able to keep everything updated.
Curtis Simmons happened upon the winning solution while working with the company that was developing our Dynamic Church Conference website. Element Fusion recommended a cool tool called Flash Nifties. This tool installs very quickly on your website and then scans specified folders for images, videos, flash movies, text files, and more. Flash Nifties constructs your video library based on the nested folder structure that you implement. We immediately loved the ease of use of this product and thought it might be a good thing to share with you guys.
Challenge c was a big concern for us. There are just two of us here and we both have “day jobs”. So, we needed a solution that was easy to maintain. We are still working on this part of our plan. Flash Nifties certainly helps due to the fact that it immediately updates based on the contents of your folder structure. We can always produce new videos and remove old ones without any impact on our client. The remaining challenge will be to ensure all videos remain up-to-date with every release! What you’ve all been waiting patiently for is a sneak peek at the video library! Click the link below to watch a quick video demonstrating the new library and its simple design. Please feel free to comment, we would really like to hear from you. |